Slice-of-life style history that gets you thinking about order and justice, and what goes on in the minds of the people a society retains to--literally--execute that justice.
The Faithful Executioner discusses an unusual journal kept by Frantz Schmidt, Nuremberg's executioner, over his entire forty-five year career. In it, Frantz documented each and every one of the executions he performed--from his first in 1573 at age nineteen until his 361st when he retired in 1628.
The book is rife with paradox. Schmidt's job is to kill and administer torture, yet he is a genuinely religious man who believes in Christian redemption, and who operates with a very clear ethical code. He is uneducated but yet quite an autodidact. He even practices healing, and came to be regarded as a popular and effective healer over the course of his long career, despite being among the lowest caste of a rigidly hierarchical Nuremberg society.
Other key themes of the book reveal still more paradox. We learn that a "properly performed" execution was just that: a performance, and a necessary one, to manage society at a time when European governments hadn't yet developed mature justice systems. We also learn that any job, no matter how "low" or distasteful, can still be performed with competence and honor.
Finally, we learn how Schmidt's father, by being in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time, was forced into the profession of executioner, casting himself and his family into what we might call a Germanic version of untouchability. As a result, Frantz's career was set for life. He would be an executioner too, just like his father. Which takes us back to the theme of redemption: Frantz's life aim was to restore his family's name so his sons wouldn't have to be executioners like him. And he succeeded.
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This author has certain of his own goals with this book. One is to undo the fictional, caricatured image of "The Executioner" that was born in the minds of 1800s-era Romantic-era poets and novelists, and which lives on today in the form of black masks, dank dungeons and iron maidens, none of which actually existed in the preceding era. Another of his goals is to dispense with our modern moral superiority. We moderns tend to look back condescendingly on the medieval and early modern eras, thinking how our societies would never participate in the cruelties of those eras. Quite the contrary: today, nation-state violence has never been more pervasive or cruel.
I'll end this essay with two criticisms, one minor, one not so minor. At times the book becomes rote, bogged down in its own minutiae. Many details, and for that matter most of the author's hypothesizing about how our executioner "thought" and "felt" (more on this in the next paragraph) could be condensed away. But then this would be a much shorter work and not a book at all.
Now for a more severe criticism, as the author commits a transgression one simply shouldn't see in professionalized history: making extensive (and I mean extensive) speculations about his subject's feelings, thoughts and beliefs when there's no evidence to say one way or the other. The author spills a lot of ink attempting to climb into the mind of our executioner, asking unanswerable questions like "What was young Frantz thinking" when he performed his first execution? "How did Frantz himself feel about his role as a professional torturer?"
At times this descends into what can only be described as pure fantasy. I'll give one blatant example. The author notes that Frantz does not add extra comments next to any of his journal entries documenting crimes of adultery. The author then asks, "Should we read into Frantz's seeming indifference to adultery some unhappiness or even strife between the executioner and his own wife, Maria? Or could it suggest implicit evidence of his own infidelity?"
These are childish questions, and a professional historian should know better. A historian separates what is known from what is not known. He certainly does not make up girlish rhetoric implying things that can't possibly be known. This is what James Michener does, and we call that historical fiction, not history.
[Readers, what follows are my notes and reactions to the book--they are here to help me order my thinking and better remember what I read. Feel free to skim the bolded parts.]
Notes:
Preface
xvff What is going through the mind of this 63-year-old veteran executioner...? On Frantz Schmidt, career executioner, who kept a personal journal of the executions and various other punishments he administered throughout his long career; on his 45-year-long journal, begun at age 19 in 1573 until his retirement in 1618, a period over which he personally executed 394 people.
xvii On "executioner's memoirs" as a popular genre in the beginning of the modern era, roughly the mid 17th to the mid-19th centuries.
xviiiff On the idiosyncrasies of this journal: Frantz hardly ever refers to himself; never talks about his wife or seven children; also on doubts about the authenticity of various copies and versions of it; late in his life Frantz petitioned Emperor Ferdinand II to regain his family's good name so his sons wouldn't have to be executioners too.
xxii "The complex individual who emerges from this reading, supplemented by extensive archival sources, is a far cry from the stereotypical emotionless brute of popular fiction. Instead we encounter a pious, abstemious family man who was nonetheless excluded from the respectable society he serves, forced to spend most of his time with convicted criminals and the thuggish guards who assist him... Thanks to the broad chronological scope of the journal, we witness the literary and philosophical evolution of a minimally educated autodidact."
Chapter 1: The Apprentice
3ff The author [in the first of many, many examples of imagined pseudohistory] imagines Frantz learning the basics of decapitation by practicing on gourds and rhubarb, then on animals.
5ff On the various dangers of this era: illness, plague, childbirth, the violence of roving gangs and highwaymen; also fears of the supernatural, etc.
13ff On the desire for order in all this chaos: thus a skilled executioner provides a sort of justice: avenging victims, setting a terrifying example to warn others of consequences.
15ff On the social place [or total lack thereof] of executioners; on how the family line was essentially forced into executioning, as Frantz's father was in the wrong place at the wrong time when his ruler Albrecht Alciniades commandeered him to do an execution job when no one else was available.
20 On the city of Hof in the 1550s: a closed society of maybe 1,000 people, with poor weather, poor quality soil; thus the industries were cattle and sheep herding, as well as mining.
21ff It's unclear why Frantz Schmidt's father Heinrich stayed after his disgrace; also after the death of Alcibiades, his cousin Georg Friedrich, who was ruling over Branderberg-Ansbach, assumed control over Hof and instituted a series of new public ordinances and criminal legislation which resulted in a large number of prosecutions and executions. Thus Frantz's father had a reliable income that he supplemented with freelance execution work in other communities, as well as yet another sideline business of wound-healing. Then in 1572 Heinrich was able to secure the position of executioner for Bamberg, "a notable step up the career ladder." Bamberg was at the time a city of about 10,000.
24 Note the comment here about wearing a "black mask": these executioners wore no such thing; per the author the black mask was most likely an invention of 19th century-era romantics, re-imagining this earlier era.
26ff On the transition from wergild (crimes resolved by paying some form of compensation) and banishment to governmental/proto-state involvement in many aspects of justice; also the concomitant development of a consistent legal code (the "Constitutio Criminalis Carolina," or just "Carolina" for short) and a professionalized legal apparatus; thus this period is thought of as "the golden age of the executioner."
30ff Note that the Carolina had an unintended consequence where the system could "find" criminal activity almost anywhere [huh, just like the modern American legal system--where anyone and everyone can be "found a criminal" because the legal code is so complex, interlocking and infinite.]
33 Comments here on Luther and Calvin viewing the executioner as "God's instrument."
34ff More on the professionalization of execution work: more pay, more consistent work, even (slightly) more social acceptance.
36 See below for a (presumably authentic) copy of executioner Frantz Schmidt's signature on 1584 employment contract:
38ff Nothing is really known about Frantz's training [but the author sure posits a lot here]: training in restraints, different forms of torture, like eye gouging, flogging and finger-chopping.
43ff Frantz passes his master test by performing a hanging without missteps, then begins the "journeyman period" of his executioner career. On how Frantz writes, much later in his life, about the "great misfortune [that] forced the office of executioner on my innocent father as well as on myself, since as much as I would have liked, I couldn't escape it."
Chapter 2: The Journeyman
45ff Frantz performs seven executions in his first year, most of which were hangings; note that is nothing like the old "trapdoor gallows" that were developed much later in Europe, basically he had to tie the condemned person up by the neck and physically push him off a platform. And then descriptions of execution with "the wheel" which were three of his assignments his first year--all for murderers. On "execution with the wheel" as an explicitly violent even gruesome act "reserved for notorious bandits and other murderers"; it would start out beforehand where the executioner would administer a court-prescribed number of "nips": flesh ripped out of his arms or torso using red-hot tongs; followed by using a heavy wagon wheel to shatter the condemned's legs, arms and torso, starting "from the top down" in merciful executions, and "from the bottom up" for those who committed particularly heinous crimes so that the agony was prolonged. All of this served as a "ritualized outlet for the community's rage and a terrifying warning to any spectators."
53-4 We learn that Frantz never drank alcohol of any kind his entire life.
54ff Explaining the use of torture in places like Nuremberg during this era; also on the so-called "bier test" where the accused would touch the corpse of the victim, and if it bled or moved this indicated guilt.
57ff The five grades of torture: starting with showing the accused the torture "chapel" and the various devices used. This alone caused most subjects to confess. On that era's "legal axiom" that "pain releases truth."
63ff On corporal punishment: note how chopping off the two "oath fingers" of perjurers and tearing out the tongue for blasphemy had been relatively common punishments before the 16th century, but by Frantz's time these corporal punishments went out of fashion, they were seen as ludicrous or gratuitously cruel; but note that the cities of Bamberg and Nuremberg both maintained finger chopping as a punishment; Frantz chopped off the fingers of nine offenders over his career and also branded four men and "clipped the ears" of four women, and cut off the tongue of one blasphemer.
67 On the idea that executions required a lot of forethought because they were aimed at furthering the rule of law as well as the power of the authorities enforcing that rule of law.
76ff On producing a "good death": "Public executions, like corporal punishments, were meant to accomplish two goals: first, to shock spectators and, second, to reaffirm Divine and temporal authority. A steady and reliable executioner played the pivotal role in achieving this delicate balance through his ritualized and regulated application of violence on the state's behalf." On the choreography of it all, a sort of religious redemption; on how Lutheran priests would work on the condemned, attempting to soften his heart, also attempting to make sure that the prisoner goes to the execution site with resignation. Then on the actual ceremony: a short formal procedure in front of a judge with a formal condemnation, then a public procession to the execution site, where the condemned would usually walk to the gallows in front of the townspeople. [There is absolutely an element of theater to this whole thing, just like today the legal apparatus will often "perp-walk" high-profile targets in front of the media as part of the choreography of nation-state control.]
85ff On the "performance pressure" on the executioner: some condemned would be insolent, smirking, kicking the assistants, or screaming and yelling uncontrollably; others would perform a sort of redemption arc, asking forgiveness, blessing the crowd; others might flail around in the beheading chair, requiring Frantz to swing more than once. Note that Meister Frantz required a second stroke only four times over 187 recorded beheadings across his 45-year career; other examples here of violent reactions from spectators to a botched execution where they would stone the hangman; thus each time the executioner performed his job there was some degree of risk to his own life. [Much later in the book the reader will learn that Frantz only had three genuinely botched executions, of which one resulted in an investigation and a scolding from the city government.] The author describes it as a "public performance" from start to finish.
88 When Frantz turns 23 in 1577, he gets a plum job as the executioner at Nuremberg, "perhaps the most prestigious in the empire." It turned out that the existing executioner had married Frantz's sister, who was working as his housekeeper. Note also the prior executioner had certain professional and personal shortcomings, botching certain executions, he then had some sort of infirmity and Frantz was hired as an interim executioner, the brother-in-law soon became ill and then died, and so Frantz got the job. It was at this point, in 1578, that Frantz decided to begin his journal.
Chapter 3: The Master
91ff One of the longest entries in Frantz's journal was about the forger and con artist Gabriel Wolff; the author speculates what was it about this guy that piqued Frantz's interest: Wolff lived among the rich and powerful, and his thefts amounted to hundreds of times the average person's earnings, also Wolff was very international and duped people all over Europe. The author suspects [or more accurately, makes up] that there's something about this guy's ability to move all through the strictly hierarchical society of that era, committing all kinds of fraud; the author also speculates that this guy squandered social advantages that Frantz Schmidt would never experience, and yet Wolff, because of his social status, was yet shown mercy in certain aspects of his execution, despite a 24-year crime spree. [As much as I don't like "speculative sprees" in my history, it is interesting to think about how the executioner, who really believes in the system of hierarchy as he's trying to get his family to their next socio-economic status level, appears to be deeply offended by this particular criminal who used all the advantages of social status that he could. It's also interesting to see how people always try to "get more social status": no matter where in the hierarchy they are, it's critically important to get higher. It's interesting to think about this, to think about to what extent you really want to play the game... or lose your attachment to it.]
94ff Details here on Nuremberg: a much larger city with 40,000 people; one of the largest centers in the Holy Roman Empire; politically powerful; relatively religiously tolerant; also Nuremberg's banks and mercantile firms competed with the Medicis of Florence and the Fuggers of Augsburg.
98 This is a fairly high-paying job: the pay was 130 florins annually plus good-quality housing and a regular supply of wine and firewood, as well as lifelong tax-free status. Also Frantz could earn extra income for performing interrogations as well as work as a medical consultant. Thus Frantz would have been in the top 5% of earners in Nuremberg and "probably the best paid executioner in the empire." At age 24 he was earning three times as much as his own father.
99ff The unclear development of a relationship between Frantz and Maria Beckin, age 34, a spinster with no dowry; her father, a warehouse worker, had died, leaving her mother widowed with seven children, including Maria. In other words, somebody with no prospects. The author notes here that even a person of low birth would not consider marrying an executioner, "but a thirty-four-year-old spinster with no dowry and three other eligible sisters at home would have few--if any--alternatives." Their first child was born and baptized--unlike most executioner's children because of their low status. All of Frantz's and Maria's subsequent children were baptized too.
102ff Comments on the executioner's responsibilities, other nuances of Nuremberg's justice system, which hired other workers to manage the prison as well as perform certain other distasteful responsibilities--like overseeing the municipal brothel--that in most other Germanic cities of this era would be given to the executioner to manage.
110 Discussion of residents of Nuremberg versus people from away: on the important distinction between people of a community and people from outside that community; you might have different dialects or even entirely different languages spoken within just a few miles of a given village because people traveled so little in this era. Also, if you were a citizen of Nuremberg you had the right to certain criminal "privileges" like being beheaded instead of some worse form of execution like strangling or drowning; you had the right to an "easier" death. Also it was rather unusual for Frantz to leave his birthplace of Hof to come to Nuremberg, and, understandably, it took him many years to start thinking of himself as a local; it was many years before he wrote in his journal comments like "our town" or "one of our citizens" that indicate he thought of himself as a Nuremberger.
111 Comments here about the sanctity of the class system: Frantz writes about his social superiors with "reverence" as the author puts it. [This is obviously something we moderns struggle with. But any reader of Nietzsche would understand, there is a time and a place for this sort of social organization.]
112 Comments here on the noble right of non torquendo: the nobility were never tortured before execution, and they always received the most merciful killing, a quick beheading.
114ff Long and low-momentum section here that should be cut down, describing nicknames and naming conventions in the era; a long section on a wide range of different types of crimes, ranging from theft to slander to infanticide, including graphic details of some of the more outrageous crimes; on Frantz Schmidt's outrage at certain crimes and sympathy for victims. But then again Frantz is oddly silent on certain highly unusual crimes that warrant comment, like the case of a woman who fed her husband insect powder in his porridge.
130 One of many instances throughout the book here of poor quality history, where the author guesses pointlessly about Frantz's thoughts and feelings when nothing of the sort can be known: here the author wonders why crimes of adultery never received any commentaries in Frantz's journal, and then the author asks: "Should we read into Frantz's seeming indifference to adultery some unhappiness or even strife between the executioner and his own wife, Maria? Or could it suggest implicit evidence of his own infidelity?" [These are childish questions, a professional historian should know better than to speculate like this with no basis whatsoever. State the odd omission of commentary, but leave out the rhetoric implying "unhappiness" or strife with the wife.] The author later says "...it remains impossible to gauge."
132 Also Frantz is required to torture and execute his brother-in-law (!), a guy guilty of multiple crimes, who managed to marry his widowed sister; there's also no commentary in his journal about this situation either. The author writes: "It's not hard to infer how Frantz felt about his notorious brother-in-law." [Again, this is speculative, James Michener-grade history.]
136 Frantz is awarded citizenship in Nuremberg in 1593, a cherished privilege as well as an extremely unlikely one for an executioner. Frantz petitioned the city for citizenship and his request was approved, although he had to take his oath separately, one day after all the other new citizens were sworn in.
Chapter 4: The Sage
137ff Now 46 and "middle-aged," Frantz is writing much longer diary entries for his various executions. The author discusses reasons why he could easily grow more bitter and pessimistic as he aged: in 1600 his 16-year-old son died of plague, then three weeks later his 55-year-old wife Maria died, probably from the same plague, leaving him a widower with four surviving children between the ages of four and 13. He didn't leave any record of his grief or any personal references at all in his journal. Notably also Frantz never wed again. His journal however did begin to reveal "a growing fascination with the hows and whys of human behavior."
141ff Long section here of Frantz's comments on different types of crimes grouped by category: crimes of malice, crimes of passion, crimes of habit; he was appalled by anything premeditated, particularly by home invasions; the author describes a lot of these crimes in detail, based on the detail in Frantz's journals, and from that tries to infer that Frantz is more angered/appalled by certain crimes compared to others.
153ff In the discussion of "crimes of passion" the author describes Frantz's diary entries as "the bored affect of a traffic report." The author concludes therefore that Frantz didn't consider these types of crimes as serious or as reprehensible. The exception here are certain "lewdness" offenses where Frantz would write longer entries, sometimes in ribald Chaucerian style, as the author puts it.
168ff Discussion here of mercy and redemption and Frantz's Lutheran beliefs; a discussion on the repeated use of the word "mercy" in his journal; also on Frantz's repeated mention of executions where the condemned "took leave of the world as a Christian."
173ff Discussion here of youth crimes, mostly thefts, along with changes in Nuremberg policy to use capital punishment on young offenders, even down to the age of 14. The examples given here are all of multiple offenders, teenage criminals who had been banished repeatedly from the city and yet still returned, committed crimes and were caught multiple times. Frantz typically did not comment on the ages of his victims but later in his life began to mention their ages. Also the author notes Frantz's impatience with multiple offenders, noting commentaries like "should have been executed two years before" in Frantz's journal.
179ff Unexpected and sudden transition here into evidence [guesses really] about Frantz's piety; on a song he may (or may not) have written for a Meistersinger competition about the story of Abgar and Jesus [see Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History].
Chapter 5: The Healer
185ff This [very loosely organized] chapter starts out with a strange anecdote about thieves chopping off the right hand of a baby to use as a talisman to provide good luck--even invisibility--in very odd and poorly tied in segue to Frantz's work as a healer. On how Frantz earned up to half his income via healing, and "continued to flourish" at it after he retired from executions; on the competition in this era between academically-trained physicians who were too expensive for most people, guild-trained barber-surgeons, "wound doctors" and apothecaries, all with similar levels of credibility as healers.
190ff Note this comment about "the controversial physician" Paracelsus (1493-1541), who "famously claimed that he learned the bulk of his healing remedies and techniques from executioners and cunning people," while rejecting most of what he'd been taught in medical school. The author once again hypothesizes/guesses how Frantz would have learned his healing arts, citing different books and pamphlets of the period, supposing that Frantz would learn these arts on the job, etc.
196ff Beliefs in that era of the curative powers of the deceased, including practices like drinking the blood of the executed; other examples of body parts used for healing ranging from ground bones to skin. On the demand for corpses of executed criminals; also the author says there are only three instances where Frantz Schmidt specifically said in his journal "I dissected the body."
202ff On black magic-like beliefs of that era; also the pan-European "witch craze" that happened around 1550-1650, roughly the same era of Frantz's life; any association with "magic" could be dangerous, especially when executioners were already often presumed to be secret sorcerers; the author describes Nuremberg as an oasis of restraint during the witch craze.
207ff Several pages of discussion here on Frantz's interactions with various fraudulent people claiming to have sorcery or magic skills; Frantz takes none of them seriously and some of them he whipped out of town, others were thieves who believed in various talismans etc.
211ff Frantz is now getting towards the end of his career, although continuing to do his physically demanding duties; in 1611 he screws up an execution, requiring three strokes to decapitate a female convict. He wrote the word botched at the end of the journal entry. This was followed by two more botched executions in the following three years. Finally, the final execution of his career, in 1617, the live burning of a counterfeiter. Eight months later, in July of 1618, there were two executions planned, but Meister Frantz was too infirm to carry either of them out. The city hired a new executioner, Bernhard Schlegel, and Frantz retired after 40 years, giving up his service. All Frantz wrote in his diary was "On July 4 [1618] I became ill and on Stl. Laurence's Day [August 10] gave up my service, having held and exercised the office for forty years." However, there was then a power struggle between Frantz and the newly hired executioner "that would continue for years to come" according to the author. The town was quite loyal to Frantz, and his successor Schlegel constantly argued with the town leadership for more money; the author speculates [again!!] that Schlegel was strapped with gambling debts and lacked the sober lifestyle of his predecessor. The two had a long-running argument about the residence that Schmidt was supposed to vacate for the new executioner, they also had a rivalry over their healing work, which Frantz continued after retiring from performing executions.
218ff Finally in 1624, some six years after he retired, Frantz wrote a 15-page letter to emperor Ferdinand II requesting formal restitution of his family's honor. The author describes the letter as "a model of rhetorical finesse." He sent it by private courier to the Imperial Court in Vienna and three months later received a reply granting his wish. At the time he was 70 years old.
221ff Details here on Frantz's family at this point: his oldest surviving daughter Rosina married a man who either died or absconded; then later she was briefly imprisoned for (allegedly spurious) charges; on Frantz's two surviving sons: Frantz Steffan, at this point age 35, and Frantzenhans, age 31, continued to live with their father, their occupations are unclear but neither became executioners. The younger son eventually became a healer. Frantz's youngest daughter Maria was still running his household. Then in 1628 Frantz's granddaughter Elisabeth, the daughter of Rosina, died at age 16, the cause was unrecorded. Finally, his daughter Maria married 44-year-old Hans Ammon in 1632; this was an indicator of the family's regained status. Strangely, Hans died 19 days later: Frantz was Hans' personal physician and the two had become close friends, thus the author speculates that Hanz just wanted to marry such that his property would go on to Frantz's family by way of marriage to his daughter.
223: Comments here on the sectarian violence that would later come to be called the Thirty Years War, which had been raging across various German lands since 1618: note here the entrance into Nuremberg of the Swedish King Gustavus II Adolphus in 1630 as Sweden intervened there on behalf of protestant believers, but it also marked "the most devastating five years in the city's history and a further extension of the war" as Swedish troops demanded contributions from the city; note also King Gustav was slain in battle that year, and then also three waves of plague hit the city, first taking the life of 41-year-old Frantz Steffan Schmidt, Frantz's oldest son, who died of plague in 1633; he was unmarried and without children. And then, in the following year, 1634, an even deadlier wave of plague hit the severely overcrowded city and Frantz himself died at the age of 80, designated in all official records as Honorable Frantz Schmidt, physician, with no reference to his infamous profession. "The seemingly impossible dream that had animated his life was at last, in death, a reality, engraved for all posterity to see on his still legible gravestone."
Epilogue
227ff Comments on how Nuremberg, which hit a peak of prosperity during the middle years of Schmidt's life, entered a period of gradual and then precipitous decline. The nadir was marked by the devastation of the Thirty Years War, followed by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648; then Nuremberg would become a provincial backwater by the 18th century. A good quote here from Mack Walker: "nobody won the Thirty Years War." Less than a year after his death Frantz's oldest daughter Rosina died at age 47, leaving Maria and Frantzenhans as his only surviving children. Maria lived to be 75 and died in 1664, Frantzenhans died at age 86 in 1683. Neither of them ever had any children, leading to a tremendous irony: Frantz recovered his family name but lacked any heirs to benefit from it.
229ff Comments here on also the end of the "golden age" of European executioners, as the frequency of public executions and public punishments, already declining during Schmidt's career, declined precipitously thereafter. "Nuremberg saw only six executions by the wheel during the entire seventeenth century--compared to thirty during Meister Frantz's career alone--and only one... during the 18th century." The other goes over various speculative theories for this: that it was due to a development of greater empathy during a civilizing process, that the European emerging States simply modified their control mechanisms; the author candidly admits neither of these theories have real evidence to support them.
230 The author then offers his own theory: that by this time the authority of the state was now an established reality, as opposed to a century before; thus "the public redemption ritual of the scaffold" was firmly established in the social consciousness by this time, and so it "did not need to be reiterated at such frequent intervals." [Wherever the author might have gotten his evidence for such a claim, he neglects to tell the reader.]
231ff On the publication of Frantz's journal in 1801 and its popularity among folklorists and academics; comments here on a romantic "rebirth" of the figure of the medieval hangman, particularly in the years after the 1806 annexation of Nuremberg by the duchy of Bavaria; on the progressive criminal justice system adopted in those days; also on Nuremberg cashing in on its lucrative "heritage industry" in the mid 1800s, as the city acquired various homes and city buildings, while popularizing a completely ahistoric torture chamber--even with an iron maiden, something the city never used--creating a sort of romance of medieval cruelties that was seen as irresistible to tourists, and even to novelists including Bram Stoker [the author of Dracula], who incorporated the iron maiden into one of his short stories. All of this gave the so-called "Gothic executioner" a much greater stereotypical place in modern culture than it ever actually had. [It just goes to show that much of our impressions about history are based on the totally made-up impressions of the people who came slightly before us. Most of what we think we know just ain't so!! See the photo below for a typical example of a Romantic impression of something that never, ever was.]
Nope, never happened.
235 The author turns a good phrase here, calling this "historical vandalism in the service of profit"; describing some of the dungeons and "torture tours" that you see in cities across Europe. The author then credits Meister Frantz's former residence in Nuremberg as well-done and scrupulously historical, but can't help himself by writing about his irritation at "smiling tourists" posing in front of the Hangman's House for whom "the emotional and intellectual life of its most famous occupant is not even a tepid afterthought--it is a non sequitur." [On one level you can sympathize with the author's clear affection for his subject, but one cannot expect tourists to even read a book, much less share in the inner life of your biographee.]
235ff Note the comments here criticizing historians like Steven Pinker [see his shoddy work in The Better Angels of Our Nature] as perpetuating "the Gothic fantasy of ancien regime cruelty in the service of their own modern, secularist agenda... We view the hooded caricature of modern popular culture with the same patronizing amusement as adults watching children at play, all the time confident of our own superior rationality and sophistication." [Well put, my brother. Every age thinks it's the shit; today's age might be the most corrupt ever, but we sure do enjoy telling ourselves how superior we are, don't we?] The author further makes the case here that Frantz and his contemporaries are no more or less prone to cruelty than anyone in the 21st century. [Note also, regarding Pinker's book, the devastating criticism Nassim Taleb leveled at it: you cannot claim "violence is on the decline" in modernity when you leave both WWI and WWII out of your sample.]
238 "We know much too little of Frantz's personal experiences to say whether his was on balance a happy life. But it can be stated with certainty that it was a singularly purposeful life. Perhaps, in a cruel and capricious world, there is hope to be found in one man defying his fate, overcoming universal hostility, and simply persevering amid a series of personal tragedies. Meister Frantz clearly thought so. And that, we can agree with him, is an act of faith worthy of remembrance."
To Read:
Julius R. Ruff: Violence in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800
Gerald Strauss: Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century
Clyde A. Milner II, ed.: The Oxford History of the American West
Andreas Vesalius: De Humani Corporis Fabrica [Concerning the Construction of the Human Body, 1543]
Mark Häberlein: The Fuggers of Augsburg: Pursuing Wealth and Honor in Renaissance Germany